the 2000 us presidential election: can retrospective

B.J.Pol.S. 33, 163–187 Copyright 2003 Cambridge University Press

DOI: 10.1017/S0007123403000073 Printed in the United Kingdom

The 2000 US Presidential Election: CanRetrospective Voting Be Saved?

MORRIS FIORINA, SAMUEL ABRAMS A N D JEREMY POPE*

According to a portrait of elections widely held in academic political science, election outcomes depend onthe ‘fundamentals’, especially peace and prosperity. Al Gore’s election showing in 2000 runs counter to thepreceding interpretation of elections. Objective conditions pointed to a comfortable victory, if not a landslide,but Gore’s narrow popular vote margin fell well below the expectations held by many political scientists. Thisarticle attempts to account for Gore’s under-performance via detailed analyses of National Election Studiessurveys. We find that Gore’s often criticized personality was not a cause of his under-performance. Rather,the major cause was his failure to receive a historically normal amount of credit for the performance of theClinton administration. Secondary contributors were the drag of Clinton’s personal affairs and Gore’s decisionto run to the left of where Clinton had positioned the Democratic party. Quite possibly these three factors arelogically related: failure to get normal credit reflected Gore’s peculiar campaign, which in turn reflected fearof association with Clinton’s behaviour.

In the wake of the 1998 Monica Lewinsky scandal John Zaller argued that the movementof President Clinton’s job approval ratings during and after the scandal had seriousimplications for theoretical accounts of American mass behaviour. After plunging whenthe scandal broke, Clinton’s approval ratings recovered, then rose to a level higher thanbefore the scandal, where they held to the end of his term. The American public seeminglyresisted every attempt by the media or by Republicans to frame the president’s behaviouras anything more than a personal sexual impropriety. According to Zaller,

The tradition of studies on economic and retrospective voting, which maintains that the publicresponds to the substance of party performance, seems strengthened by the Lewinsky matter.On the other hand, the tradition of studies that focuses on the mass media, political psychology,and elite influence … seems somewhat weaker … However poorly informed, psychologicallydriven, and ‘mass mediated’ public opinion may be, it is capable of recognizing and focusingon its own conception of what matters.1

Zaller approvingly cites Key, Kramer, Mueller, Fiorina, Rosenstone and Brody, scholarswho view public opinion and electoral politics as driven by the ‘bottom line’ – especiallypeace and prosperity – the so-called ‘fundamentals’ of common political parlance.2

‘Bottom line’ scholars of our acquaintance read Zaller’s article with some satisfaction– but not for long. In November 2000, for the fifth time in a decade, an American electionjolted prevailing scholarly interpretations.3 For ‘bottom line’ scholars the 2000 election

* Department of Political Science and Hoover Institution, Stanford University.1 John Zaller, ‘Monica Lewinsky’s Contribution to Political Science’, PS: Political Science and Politics, 31

(1998), 182–9, p. 186.2 Zaller, ‘Monica Lewinsky’s Contribution to Political Science’, p. 185.3 The 1992 election brought unified Democratic government in the same year that Fiorina characterized

Republican-headed divided government as the normal state of affairs in modern American politics (see Morris

164 F I O R I N A, A B R A M S A N D P O P E

should have been a runaway victory for Al Gore. Indeed, at the American Political ScienceAssociation meetings held just two months before the election a panel of seven forecastersgave Gore from 53 to 60 per cent of the two-party popular vote, with an average predictionof 56 per cent.4 But one hardly needed a statistical forecasting model to predict a Gorevictory in 2000. The United States had enjoyed a lengthy economic boom that had seenunemployment fall to levels previously considered impossible without sparking inflation,and burgeoning budget surpluses had replaced ‘two hundred billion dollar deficits as faras the eye can see’.

Elections are not only about economics, of course, but the news on other fronts waspositive as well. The crime rate had been falling for several years, welfare reform was anapparent success and American soldiers were not in harm’s way. Moreover, there was nosignificant divergence between traditional objective indicators and subjective perceptionsas there had been in 1992; presidential approval hovered around 60 per cent, economicconfidence was at 70 per cent and satisfaction with the state of the country was above 60per cent.5 Nor, despite the subsequent economic slowdown, did any of these indicatorsbegin to decline until after the election.6 Under such conditions the election was a foregoneconclusion, or so the portrait of elections advanced by ‘bottom line’ scholars suggested.7

But somehow Al Gore failed to receive the full benefit of these favourablecircumstances. To be sure, he won the popular vote by a tiny margin, but his share of thetwo-party vote ( � 50.2 per cent) was 3–9 points lower than forecast, making the electiona cliff-hanger when many forecasters and pundits expected a landslide.8

Thus, whether the standard is sophisticated statistics or common sense, the puzzle is whyAl Gore was not swept into the White House by a wave of grateful retrospective voters.This article attempts to account for Gore’s under-performance. In the next section wediscuss various hypotheses that have been offered. Some of these reflect arguments thateconomic, retrospective or ‘bottom line’ voting occurred less commonly or less strongly

(F’note continued)

Fiorina, Divided Government (New York: Macmillan, 1992), p. 2). The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994upset longstanding interpretations of House elections that presumed a more-or-less permanent Democraticmajority (see Gary Jacobson, ‘The Persistence of Democratic House Majorities’, in Gary Cox and Samuel Kernell,eds, The Politics of Divided Government (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991), pp. 57–84). The ‘status-quo’ electionof 1996 (see Everett Ladd, ‘1996 Vote, the “No Majority” Realignment Continues’, Political Science Quarterly,112 (1997), 1–28) produced an unprecedented pattern of divided government – the first Democratic president everelected with Republican congressional majorities, contradicting arguments like Jacobson’s that voters naturallypreferred Republican-headed divided control over the opposite (see Jacobson, ‘The Persistence of DemocraticHouse Majorities’, pp. 68–71). The Republican loss of House seats in 1998 undercut one of the hoariestgeneralizations in American politics – that the party of the president loses seats in the mid-term election. All inall, the past decade has been quite hard on empirical generalizations about American elections.

4 Christopher Wlezien, ‘Why Gore (Probably) Lost’, Slate, 8 November 2001.5 Gallup Organization News Releases, 2000.6 ‘Economy,’ Public Perspective (November/December 2000), 40–1; and ‘Polity Watch’, Public Perspective

(November/December 2000), 42–3.7 For explanations of and excuses for the 2000 performance of forecasting models, see recapitulations in PS:

Political Science and Politics, March 2001, and in the May 2001 issue of American Politics Research.8 Larry Bartels and John Zaller, in ‘Presidential Vote Models: A Recount’, PS: Political Science and Politics,

34 (2000), 9–20, make the unique argument that the average of forty-eight forecasting models was reasonablyaccurate in 2000. They reach this conclusion by constructing a class of models that predicts a Gore loss of 2–4points under the conditions prevailing in 2000. These models that predict a Gore defeat partly balance out themodels that predict a comfortable Gore victory. Given that their argument does not pass the straight-face test, wecan only surmise that the Bartels and Zaller piece is a brilliantly executed spoof of election forecasting.

The 2000 US Presidential Election 165

in 2000 than in earlier elections. Other hypotheses identify factors in 2000 that might haveoverridden the operation of traditional retrospective voting. In the third section of thearticle we bring American National Election Studies (NES) data to bear on the hypotheses.Some we can evaluate directly, others only indirectly, but the data support three hypothesesabout Gore’s under-performance: (1) he failed to receive a historically typical allotmentof credit for the performance of the Clinton administration; (2) Gore abandoned Clinton’scentrist strategy and waged a neo-populist campaign (‘I will fight for you!’); (3) voters’disapproval of Bill Clinton as a person finally showed up in their behaviour. In theconclusion we discuss the possibility that these findings are causally connected.Interestingly, we find little indication that the personalities of the candidates played anyimportant role in the outcome.

WHY DID AL GORE FALL SHORT OF EXPECTATIONS?

In the aftermath of the election journalists, pundits, politicians and political scientistsoffered explanations for Gore’s feat of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Thesecan be incorporated under four general hypotheses. The first asserts that the 2000 electionwas different in one or more important respects that weakened the impact of traditional‘bottom line’ considerations such as the state of the economy and the administration’sperformance. The second and third hypotheses allow that traditional ‘bottom line’considerations might have operated normally – in Gore’s favour – but identify otheranti-Gore factors that overwhelmed the effects of the so-called fundamentals. Finally, thereis a more complex hypothesis that partly overlaps the others. Some have suggested thata factor peculiar to 2000 – ‘Clinton fatigue’ – produced what one might call ‘moralretrospective voting’ that directly overwhelmed the fundamentals, indirectly weakenedtheir impact through Gore’s campaign choices, or both. We provide a brief elaboration ofthe logic and circumstantial evidence underlying these hypotheses.

Hypothesis 1: The Fundamentals Were Weaker in 2000

According to the works cited by Zaller, elections have a heavy retrospective component,reflecting the electorate’s judgement of whether incumbents have performed acceptablyon the fundamental dimensions of social welfare – maintaining prosperity and keeping thepeace.9 By that standard the Clinton administration was a solid success. The most commonexplanation for Gore’s underperformance is that the electorate did not give him a normalallotment of credit for the administration’s performance, although the reasons offereddiffer.

Variant 1: Vice-presidents do not get credit. Some argue that if Clinton had been able torun for re-election, he would have won easily, but as vice-president, Gore was not ableto claim credit as effectively as Clinton could have done. Consistent with this argument,Lewis-Beck and Tien report a significant (post-hoc) improvement in their 2001 forecastafter incorporating an interaction between economic conditions and the absence of an

9 See e.g. V. O. Key Jr, The Responsible Electorate (New York: Vintage, 1966); Morris P. Fiorina,Retrospective Voting in American National Elections (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).


(elected) incumbent president in the race.10 Other forecasters report contrary results,however.11

While commonly asserted, the premise of the vice-presidential variant of Hypothesis1 conflicts with scattered poll evidence suggesting that Clinton would not have wonagain.12 Furthermore, a vice-president running in 1988 apparently did not make thatelection look particularly different from others. Incumbent Vice-President George HerbertWalker Bush did succeed a popular president, forecasting models based on the‘fundamentals’ were not far off the mark,13 and detailed survey analyses concluded thatBush won largely on the strength of voter evaluations of the Reagan administration.14

Variant 2: ‘What have you done for me lately?’ During the campaign various commentatorssuggested that the good economic times had gone on for so long that voters were takingthem for granted. Economic voting studies traditionally presume that voters’ time horizonsare short,15 and there are suggestions in the economic voting literature that voters are moresensitive to changes in economic condition than to their levels. Thus, the very fact ofsustained prosperity may have worked against the Democratic candidate – too many votersremembered nothing but the present good times and consequently discounted them.16 Thisvariant of the hypothesis suggests that economic retrospective evaluations should be a lessimportant determinant of the vote for Gore than for candidates not running after such asustained period of prosperity.

Variant 3: Entrepreneurs and Alan Greenspan got the credit. In early 1999 a Rasmussenpoll asked, ‘Who is most responsible for the strong economy, American businesses,Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, President Clinton, Congressional Republi-cans, or Congressional Democrats?’17 Forty per cent of the respondents credited businessand 22 per cent Greenspan, compared to 12 per cent for Clinton, and a total of 25 per cent

10 Michael Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien, ‘Modeling the Future: Lessons from the Gore Forecast’, PS: PoliticalScience & Politics, 34 (2001), 21–3. The ‘elected’ qualification assigns Gerald Ford to the non-incumbentcandidate category in 1976.

11 Douglas Hibbs, ‘Bread and Peace Voting in US Presidential Elections’, Public Choice, 104 (2000), 149–80;and Brad Lockerbie, ‘Election 2000: An Afterthought’, American Politics Research, 29 (2001), 307 – 12, p. 310.Re-estimation of Hibbs’s Model with the 2000 results included still does not find a significant effect forvice-presidents (analysis by Jeremy Pope and Shawn Treier, Stanford University, June 2001.)

12 Renshon cites various polls reporting that majorities would not vote for Clinton if he could run again, andmajorities were ‘glad to see him go’ (Stanley Renshon, ‘The Polls: The Public’s Response to the Clinton Scandals,Part 2: Diverse Explanations, Clearer Consequences’, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 32 (2002), 412–27,pp. 422–3.

13 Ray Fair, ‘Predicting Presidential Elections: The Polls Versus Fundamentals’ (unpublished paper, 9November 1988). Indeed, it is the senior author’s recollection that forecasting models gained prominence preciselybecause they predicted a Bush win during the spring of 1988 while Dukakis maintained a lead in the trial heatsuntil after the summer nominating conventions.

14 Paul Abramsom, John Aldrich and David Rohde, Change and Continuity in the 1988 Elections (Washington,DC: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 1990); and Merrill Shanks and William Miller, ‘Partisanship, Policy andPerformance: The Reagan Legacy in the 1988 Election’, British Journal of Political Science, 21 (1991), 129– 97.

15 For discussion, see Hibbs, ‘The Bread and Peace Model’. Hibbs’s results indicate that voter time horizonsare longer than usually assumed.

16 Consistent with this suggestion, an August Gallup poll reported that 52 per cent of Americans remembered1992 economic conditions as excellent or good, whereas on average only 12 per cent of Americans queried in1992 actually reported such positive views. See David Moore, ‘Booming Economy No Advantage for Gore’,Gallup Poll Release, 16 August 2000.

17 Public Perspective (June/July 1999), p. 39.


for Clinton or either congressional party. Thus, Americans in 2000 may simply havebelieved that the condition of the country was not strongly affected by who held thepresidency. Such perceptions are reasonable enough. The country is in transition to a moreglobal, information-based economy, and the political system appears to be mostly in areactive mode. Fiscal policy ceased to be an important tool for managing the economydecades ago, and in the years leading up to the election monetary policy czar Greenspanreceived a great deal of positive, if not adulatory, press.

Unfortunately, there is no long time-series of identical survey questions aboutresponsibility for the economy. Lacking these we cannot directly test the hypothesis thatAmericans today believe that politicians affect the bottom line less than Americans ofearlier eras believed they did. There is a short NES time-series that provides some supportfor the hypothesis, but it was discontinued in 1996.18 Again, the indirect implication of thisvariant of the hypothesis is that economic evaluations were less important in the decisionsof voters in 2000 than in earlier elections.

Variant 4: Al Gore did not try to take credit. Given that forecasting models do not includecampaign variables, forecasters are often accused of claiming that ‘campaigns don’tmatter’, On the contrary, most forecasters as well as proponents of ‘bottom-line’ politicsmore generally hold a more complex view in which the campaigns are themselvesdependent variables.19 At least at the presidential level both candidates have access toplenty of money and talent; thus, they will run campaigns as good as the backgroundconditions permit. Running a good campaign is easy for candidates who have peace andprosperity behind them, as did Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Bill Clinton in 1996. But evenwith talent and money, running a good campaign is far more difficult if the opposition haspeace and prosperity on their side, a predicament that faced Walter Mondale in 1984 andRobert Dole in 1996. Popular accounts often assume that the quality of the campaign ispurely a function of the brilliance of the candidate and the quality of his personality. Forexample, Republicans have charged that Dole lost the 1996 election because he ran aterrible campaign. No doubt Dole should bear some of the blame, but the reverse causalargument is probably equally plausible: his campaign was terrible because he had nochance of winning.

Some attribute Gore’s under-performance in 2000 squarely to a poor campaign strategy.In particular, until late in the campaign Gore seemed to make little attempt to claim creditfor the successes of the Clinton administration. Given the conditions that prevailed in thecountry one would have expected a campaign organized around classic retrospectivethemes like ‘You’ve never had it so good!’ ‘Eight more years!’ and ‘Are you better offtoday than you were eight years ago?’ Instead, Gore declaimed that ‘This is an electionabout the future not the past’, in effect throwing away his trump cards. Thus, voters maynot have given Gore credit for peace and prosperity because – unusually and surprisingly– he made little attempt to claim credit.20

18 The NES item reads ‘Would you say that the economic policies of the federal government have made theeconomy better, worse, or haven’t they made much difference either way?’ For the elections of 1984–96 thepercentage answering ‘Haven’t made much difference’ is 41 (1984), 57 (1988), 53 (1992) and 60 (1996).

19 Morris Fiorina and Paul Peterson, The New American Democracy, 2nd edn (New York: Addison, Wesley,Longman, 2002), pp. 305–6.

20 Divided control might have weakened the credibility of such a claim, but a majority of the thirteen electionsused by the forecasters were instances of divided control and Helmut Norpoth concludes that the president’s partybears responsibility for economic conditions whatever the pattern of institutional control. (Helmut Norpoth,


In sum, the general hypothesis that the operation of the fundamentals was muted in 2000rests on a number of different bases. While our analyses shed some light on theseunderpinnings of the basic hypothesis, we cannot conclusively differentiate among them.All predict the same general finding: the weight that American voters placed on theeconomy and the performance of the administration was lower in 2000 than in previouselections.

Hypothesis 2: Al Gore Was an Especially Unattractive Candidate

Perhaps the fundamentals exerted their normal effect in 2000 but the boost they gave toGore was overwhelmed by some negative consideration – such as Gore’s allegedlyunattractive personality. This is the second most common explanation for Gore’s failureto win the presidency. During the campaign there was much discussion of Gore’s personalcharacteristics and mannerisms. He was depicted as arrogant and a know-it-all. Hecontinually reinvented himself. He was the kind of boy who reminded the teacher she hadnot assigned homework. And he was a ‘serial exaggerator’. So widespread were thesenegative characterizations that Gore’s persona in the first debate was the subject of afamous Saturday Night Live skit that his own campaign advisers made him watch beforethe second debate – apparently with counter-productive consequences.21 In contrast,George Bush was portrayed as a likeable fellow whose comfort in his own skin madeGore’s unnaturalness all the more striking. Thus, a common explanation for Gore’s poorelectoral showing is that a significant portion of the electorate simply did not like him,bottom-line considerations notwithstanding.

Most forecasting models contain no candidate variables,22 and some research indicatesthat the importance of candidate personality is exaggerated.23 After all, the United Statesdid elect Richard Nixon twice, as well as George Bush the father. These men had somestrengths but few would argue that their personalities were among the more noteworthy.24

Still, survey studies of voting behaviour show candidate evaluations to be an importantdeterminant of voting decisions as well as a major source of change across elections.25

To be sure, candidate evaluations incorporate experience, policy stands and personalcapabilities as well as personal attractiveness, but with a little effort we can constructreasonable measures of the latter from the NES. We will use these to determine whethervoter evaluations of Gore the person were abnormally low.


‘Divided Government and Economic Voting’, Journal of Politics, 63 (2001), 414–35). Generally, the tendencyamong scholars who study economic voting in the United States has been to assume that responsibility falls moreor less automatically on the party of the president and therefore is constant from election to election. The latterassumption is implicit, of course, in time-series models that estimate a time-invariant coefficient for economicconditions.

21 The consensus was that Gore overreacted to critical reviews of his behaviour in the first debate and behavedtoo passively in the second.

22 An exception is James Campbell’s model described in ‘Polls and Votes: The Trial-Heat Presidential ElectionForecasting Model, Certainty, and Political Campaigns’, American Politics Quarterly, 24 (1996), 408–33, whichincludes the Gallup Poll trial heat available at the time of the Labor Day holiday in late August or early September.

23 Anthony King, ed., Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2002).

24 In fact, the country came very close to electing Richard Nixon in 1960 when he ran against the far morepersonable John F. Kennedy.

25 Donald Stokes, ‘Some Dynamic Elements of Contests for the Presidency’, American Political ScienceReview, 60 (1966), 19–28.


Even if evaluations of Gore’s personality were not extraordinarily negative, however,there are variations of Hypothesis 2 identifying other paths that allow for Gore’s personato produce his poor showing.

Variant 1: Oprah and MTV. Some argue that personality is more important today than itwas in the past. American presidential candidates now appear on television talk shows,such as The Oprah Show, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Late Show with DavidLetterman, and non-traditional cable networks such as MTV, leading some to fear thatAmerican politics has entered a new era where the candidates are evaluated more asentertainers than as executives. This line of argument suggests that even if evaluations ofGore were not unusually low, voters weighted them more heavily when deciding how tovote. Such a change in voting behaviour should show up in unusually large coefficientsfor candidate characteristics in voting models estimated with 2000 data as compared tothose for earlier elections.

Variant 2: Media bias. During the campaign some Democrats complained that the mediawere unfairly hard on Gore, dwelling almost obsessively on his perceived personalshortcomings, particularly his exaggerations. Indeed, a preliminary study of mediacoverage during October 2000 found that Gore received more negative coverage thanBush, although other studies report contrary findings.26 This media variant of thepersonality hypothesis gains credence from evidence that forecasting models went awrywhen the senior Bush was defeated in 1992 in part because the media created a perceptualpicture of the economy that was significantly more negative than the real economy.27 Themedia variant of the Gore personality hypothesis suggests that support for Gore shouldhave been lower among avid consumers of the media, other things being equal.

Hypothesis 3: Al Gore Was Too Liberal

Somewhat overlooked in popular and journalistic discussions of Gore’s under-performancewere the ideological positions staked out by the candidates. The reason probably lies in thecommon survey finding that voters tended to agree more with Gore than with Bush on theissues – education, health care, the environment and so forth – generally issues on whichthe Democrats have an advantage in public opinion. Thus, taking account of the candidates’positions apparently only adds to the puzzle of Gore’s under-performance.

However natural, the preceding interpretation may be a misreading of the electorate’sperceptions of the candidates. Many scholars and pundits think that Bill Clinton’s signalpolitical contribution was to bring the Democratic party back to the centre – to convincetraditionally-oriented middle-class voters they had nothing to fear from electing a

26 The Project for Excellence in Journalism monitored 1,149 stories from seventeen news publications,television programmes and websites, reporting that 24 per cent of Bush stories were positive compared to 13 percent of Gore stories. Fifty-six per cent of Gore stories were negative, compared to 49 per cent of Bush stories(www.journalism.org/publ research/campaign1.html, accessed 10 July 2001). In partial contrast, Johnston, Hagenand Jamieson report that Gore was treated more positively than Bush on the evening news shows from theDemocratic convention until the beginning of October, but coverage was balanced thereafter. See RichardJohnston, Michael Hagen and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, ‘Dynamics of the 2000 Presidential Campaign: Evidencefrom the Annenberg Survey’ (paper presented at the 2001 Annual Meetings of the American Political ScienceAssociation).

27 Marc Hetherington, ‘The Media’s Role in Forming Voters’ National Economic Evaluations in 1992’,American Journal of Political Science, 40 (1996), 372–95.


Democratic president. In contrast, regardless of his positions on specific issues, manycommentators saw Gore as running further to the left than had Clinton, a charge commonamong sympathizers of the Democratic Leadership Council.28 Particularly in view ofZaller’s finding that ideological moderation is an important correlate of the post-warpresidential vote, we think it worthwhile to take a close look at voter perceptions of thecandidates’ positions in 2000.29 Perhaps Al Gore lost support because of his ideologicalpositioning. In the VNS exit poll, for example, more voters opined that Gore was ‘tooliberal’ (43 per cent) than that Bush was ‘too conservative’ (34 per cent).

Hypothesis 4: The 2000 Election Result Was an Anomaly Caused by Clinton Fatigue

Why might Gore have decided not to claim credit for the performance of the Clintonadministration and run as a neo-populist instead? During the campaign there weresuggestions in the media that psychological factors were at work. Gore wanted to be hisown man (recall his widely-noted assertion to that effect in his acceptance speech at theDemocratic convention), and win or lose on his own with no help from Clinton,30 perhapsbecause Clinton had displaced Al Gore Sr as the object of Gore Jr’s resentment.31

Psychologists are better qualified to evaluate such hypotheses, but such interpretations runcounter to the common perception that Gore would do anything to be president.32

A more political explanation is the belief in Gore campaign circles that disapproval ofPresident Clinton’s personal behaviour was a serious threat to the vice-president’spropects.33 Going into the election the one negative element in the public’s perception ofthe state of the nation was the belief that the country was morally on the wrong track,whatever the state of the economy or world affairs.34 According to some insiders, anythingdone to raise the association between Gore and Clinton would have produced a net lossof support – the impact of Clinton’s personal negatives would outweigh the positive impactof his job performance on support for Gore.35

Thus, Hypothesis 4 suggests that a previously unexamined variable played a major rolein 2000 – the retiring president’s personal approval. Analyses of presidential votingcustomarily include the job approval of the president, but personal variables typically are

28 E.g., Michael Kinsley, ‘The Art of Finger-Pointing’, Slate, 31 October 2000. In part, Gore’s leftward shiftmay have been a response to Bradley’s challenge from the left in the primaries, but Gore seemed to make lessof an effort to return to the centre than Bush did after he lurched to the right to fight off the McCain challenge.

29 Zaller, ‘Monica Lewinsky’s Contribution to Political Science’, pp. 185–6.30 Ron Brownstein, ‘Gore, Curiously, Fails to Take Credit for Policy Achievements’, Los Angeles Times, 17

October 2000.31 Such suggestions crossed the boundary into silliness at times. For example, ‘At some level I think he’s very

angry about the way he was raised. This Oedipal dynamic lies at the heart of the campaign he has run. With bigAlbert dead, Gore has made Bill Clinton into a father figure, one who while ostensibly wishing him well is alsocausing him damage’, quoted from Jacob Weisberg, ‘Why Gore (Probably) Lost’, Slate, 8 November 2000.

32 James Ceaser and Andrew Busch, The Perfect Tie (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), p. 118.33 While Clinton’s job approval ratings held steady at about 60 per cent during the January to August period

when the scandal raged, the percentage of the population that believed Clinton was ‘honest and trustworthy’declined 16 points to 31 per cent, the percentage believing Clinton ‘shares your values’ dropped 13 points to 37per cent, and the percentage believing Clinton ‘has high moral and ethical standards’ fell 20 points to 19 per cent.See ‘As the Scandals Have Persisted, Clinton’s Standing on Matters of Integrity Has Plunged’, The PublicPerspective (October/November 1998), 24–5.

34 In the VNS Exit Poll 57 per cent of the respondents said that the country was on the wrong track in termsof its moral climate.

35 Personal conversation with Sam Popkin, public opinion analyst for the Gore campaign.


limited to those of the contending candidates. So, when the president is not himself acandidate, his personal approval is not included in the analysis.

One reason why analysts may not think to include such a variable is that personal andjob approval for most presidents track reasonably closely, so that job ratings stand in forpersonal ratings. But a high correlation is not invariably the case. Jimmy Carter’s 1980ratings were the converse of Clinton’s 2000 ratings: high personal and low job ratings.Reflecting these observations we estimate 2000 voting models that include a measure ofPresident Clinton’s personal standing as well as his job approval. If the former is asignificant determinant of the vote, it may have overridden the traditional performancevariables. More subtly, if coefficients on the performance variables are lower than in pastelections, that may have been the price of the Gore campaign’s attempt to minimize thenegative effect of Clinton’s personal ratings.

ANALYSIS : THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

The empirical analysis that follows utilizes data from the American National ElectionStudies.36 This compilation of academic surveys contains a wealth of data on the pastthirteen US presidential elections (1952–2000), although item availability limits ouranalysis to the period 1972–2000 for the most part. The NES surveys are far more detailedthan most commercial surveys and many important variables are measured in the same wayover time, permitting temporal comparisons that are impossible when using commercialsurveys and exit polls.

In evaluating the hypotheses we consider both the distributions of such importantvariables as presidential approval, ideological distance and candidate evaluations, and theweights Americans assigned to such variables when casting their votes in 2000.Specifically, we estimate voting models that include party identification,37 perceptions ofthe economy, presidential performance, ideology and candidate evaluations.38 Tables 1–3report the estimations, where for ease of exposition and interpretation only significantcoefficients are reported.39 For reasons explained below, the vote equations abstracted inthese three tables differ in their treatment of ideology. The equations in Table 1 do notinclude an ideological variable (the least missing data), the equations in Table 2 includethe voter’s ideological self-placement (more missing data), and the equations in Table 3include a measure of candidate ideological proximity (the most missing data).40 Inclusion

36 Data from the National Election Studies is available at www.umich.edu/˜nes/.37 Measures of voter party ID have a strong and statistically significant impact in all models estimated in this

article; thus, we say no more about it. No one should be surprised that people who say they are Democrats(Republicans) are very likely to report that they approve the performance of a Democratic (Republican) presidentand generally vote for Democratic (Republican) candidates. As reported in the text, however, even controllingfor voter partisanship, factors such as performance ratings, candidate evaluations and ideology have a significantimpact on the vote.

38 All equations were estimated using CLARIFY (see Gary King, Michael Tomz and Jason Wittenberg, ‘Makingthe Most of Statistical Analysis: Improving Interpretation and Presentation’, American Journal of PoliticalScience, 44 (2000), 374–61). Missing data were imputed via AMELIA (see Gary King, James Honaker, Anne Josephand Kenneth Scheve, ‘Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data: An Alternative Algorithm for MultipleImputation’, American Political Science Review, 95 (2001), 49–69.

39 Complete statistics are available on http://www.stanford.edu˜mfiorina. Given clear expectations about thesigns of the coefficients, one-tailed tests are appropriate. Thus, the probit coefficients listed in the tables have zvalues greater than 1.6, approximately the 0.05 significance level.

40 Use of self-placements rather than proximities increases the average number of observations by about 80per election. Omitting ideology entirely increases the average number of observations by about 270.


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of the proximity measure takes some explanatory power away from the Republicancandidate variables, the economic condition variables and presidential performance, butwe think our major conclusions are robust, whether we rely on Table 1, 2 or 3. We saymore about the specific variables included in the equations and how they wereoperationalized as we evaluate each substantive hypothesis.

Hypothesis 1: Did the Fundamentals Operate Differently in 2000?

Yes, it appears that they did. Although the direct link between economic perceptions(‘economy better’) and the vote was on the high side of the historical range, the link betweenthe far more important presidential performance variable and the vote was noticeablyweaker in 2000. Figure 1 graphs the relationship, showing the average coefficients takenfrom the models reported in Tables 1–3. Even with myriad control variables, the associationbetween performance ratings and the vote is large and highly significant in all elections,but the coefficient in 2000 is lower than in the other seven elections. Absent any measureof ideology (Table 1) or in the presence of ideological self-identification (Table 2), theimpact of presidential performance in 2000 is significantly (p � 0.05) lower than in the threeelections in which an incumbent won a landslide re-election (1972, 1984, 1996), while the95 per cent confidence intervals for the elections of 1976, 1980, 1988 and 1992 overlap thatfor 2000. Thus, the evidence for the vice-presidential hypothesis is mixed. Votes for Gorewere significantly less closely tied to administration performance than votes for Clinton in1996, but not significantly less so than the votes for incumbent presidents Carter in 1976or Bush the elder in 1992. However, setting statistical significance aside, the 1988 and 2000coefficients are the six smallest of the twenty-four reported in Tables 1–3.

Whether statistically different or not, the coefficients suggest voting differences that arequite important. In particular, simulations using the equations reported in Tables 1 and 2indicate that had Gore received the same boost from Clinton’s performance in 2000 thatthe senior Bush did from Reagan’s performance in 1988, he would have received about8 more percentage points of the vote.41

Fig. 1. The effect of presidential performance on the vote fell to a modern low in 2000Note: Points are yearly averages of presidential performance coefficients from Tables 1, 2 and 3.

41 These calculations assume that the 2000 electorate attached the same weight to presidential approval as the1988 electorate, holding everything else constant. This conclusion would not follow from Table 3, where the 1988and 2000 presidential performance coefficients are equal, but as explained below, in that estimation ideologicalproximity (not included in Tables 1 and 2) puts Gore at a significant disadvantage relative to Bush.


Figure 1 does not speak directly to the other variants of Hypothesis 1, but some additionalanalysis does. Pondering President Clinton’s high approval ratings some commentatorswondered whether they were somehow artificial, reflections of popular resentment ofcongressional Republicans or a salacious media, for example, rather than genuine approvalof substantive performance. On the contrary, Clinton’s job ratings reflect economicsubstance about as much as those of previous presidents. Table 4 reports statisticalassociations between voters’ perceptions of the economy and their evaluations of thepresident’s job performance, controlling for voter partisanship.42

The relationships are quite variable – Nixon’s ratings in 1972 and Carter’s in 1980probably reflected foreign affairs more than presidential ratings did in other years, andsome insignificant coefficients probably reflect too few cases – it would be hard to arguethat the economy had improved in 1980, although a few respondents did. But perceptionsof economic conditions are associated with presidential performance judgements in eachof the elections, with negative perceptions somewhat more consistently important thanpositive ones. The 2000 coefficients are a bit smaller than some earlier ones in the series,but the probabilities derived from them do not suggest a noticeably smaller association

TABLE 4 Much Like Those of Earlier Presidents,Clinton’s Approval Ratings in 2000 WereSignificantly Related to Perceptions of theEconomy*

Economy Economybetter worse Impact†

1972 – � 0.437 0.171976 0.226 � 0.490 0.271980 I – � 0.514 0.18

1980 II – � 0.550 0.141984 0.593 � 0.682 0.271988 0.374 � 0.484 0.231992 – � 0.675 0.261996 0.677 � 0.525 0.412000 0.301 � 0.294 0.22

*Cell entries are probit coefficients of presidential approval oneconomic perceptions, controlling for party identification. Onlycoefficients significant at 0.05 included.†Impact is the difference in probability that a political independentapproves of the president’s performance as a function of perceivingeconomic conditions to have got better rather than worse.Notes: 1972–1980I equations use ‘business conditions’ as economicmeasure; 1980II–2000 equations use ‘condition of the nation’seconomy’ as economic measure.

42 We begin in 1972 because that is the first year that the NES includes the standard presidential performanceitem. From 1972 to 1980 the economic performance item referred to the trend in business conditions during thepast year. From 1980 to 2000 the economic performance item asked about the condition of the nation’s economyduring the past year. Both items were included in 1980 and as the table shows the later item seems somewhat morestrongly related to presidential performance judgements. Given the near decade-long length of the US expansion,the references to ‘during the last year’ seem less than optimal, but the item continues to have considerableexplanatory power, even controlling for partisanship.


between economic conditions and presidential performance ratings in 2000. For example,the third column of the table shows the estimated difference in the probability that anindependent voter approves of the president’s performance depending on whether shethought the national economy had improved or deteriorated. In 2000 the estimated impactof ‘better’ versus ‘worse’ economic perceptions on independents’ presidential perform-ance ratings is 0.22; the average of the preceding five estimates using the same item is 0.26.Thus, voters in 2000 did not think that politicians were irrelevant to economic performance,nor had they experienced good times for so long that they could imagine no alternative.Americans recognized that times were good and gave Clinton a normal allotment of creditfor them.43

In sum, the fundamentals still mattered a great deal in 2000, but not as much as in earlierelections. Clinton’s job ratings reflected the state of the economy to about the same degreeas the ratings of previous presidents, but his job ratings affected the presidential vote lessthan job ratings did in all the earlier elections. Here alone is a sufficient explanation forthe forecasters’ Waterloo in 2000: their longitudinal models assume the fundamentals exerta constant effect over time, an assumption that apparently failed in 2000. While we hesitateto assert conclusively why it failed, the process of elimination points the finger towardsGore’s campaign, although there is some weak evidence that vice-presidents get a weakerboost from the fundamentals than presidents.

Hypothesis 2: Was Al Gore Especially Unlikeable?

Estimating the independent impact of the candidates themselves is the most difficulttask in this analysis. The reason is that the candidates are at least in part empty vesselsinto which voters can pour their hopes and fears. That is particularly true of newcomersto the national scene such as George W. Bush. Moreover, voters’ judgements of thecandidates are functions of the positions the candidates adopt and the records theyhave compiled. But since most of the critical commentary on Al Gore focused on hispersonality, or more broadly, on a set of negative personal attributes independent of hisgovernment experience and his policy stands, we need valid measures of the candidates’personal attributes in order to investigate this explanation for Gore’s sub-par showing in2000.

To construct such measures we turned to a set of open-ended questions about what voterslike and dislike about the candidates. The NES series includes these questions for everyelection since 1952.44 Voters answer in their own words and their responses are recordedverbatim, to be coded into broad categories at a later date. We took the list of codingcategories (which had grown to more than 700 by 2000) and divided them into two. Thefirst category – personal attributes – includes all comments about the candidates’ inherentcharacteristics – intelligence/stupidity, arrogance/humility, sincerity/insincerity, honesty/

43 A total of 39 per cent of respondents said that national economic conditions had got better, and 17 per cent(mostly Republicans) that conditions had got worse.

44 The series consists of four questions. It begins, ‘Now I’d like to ask you about the good and bad points ofthe two major candidates for President. Is there anything in particular about (Republican candidate) that mightmake you want to vote for him?’ The interviewer then probes for up to five responses. The negative variant ofthe question follows next: ‘Is there anything in particular about (Republican candidate) that might make you wantto vote against him?’ Analogous questions enquire about the Democratic candidate. While a respondentconceivably might offer a total of twenty (four times five) comments, in practice large majorities confinethemselves to one or two comments in response to each question.


dishonesty, morality/immorality and so forth.45 The complementary category is moreheterogeneous and includes all the responses that seem in any way acquired by thecandidates over the course of their careers – their experience, records, issue positions,group allegiances and so forth. For want of a better term we refer to this dimension by theacronym ERIG – experience, records, issues and groups. Given our interest in voters’feelings about the candidates as people, a clearly-defined first category is our primaryconcern.46

Figures 2–5 summarize a fascinating history of Americans’ judgements of thepresidential candidates in the second half of the twentieth century. We briefly discuss theentire sequences both because of their inherent interest and as a way of putting the 2000race in a broader context.

Figure 2 compares public perceptions of Republicans on the personal and ERIGdimensions.47 There are two clear patterns. First, on balance voters generally feel positivelyabout Republican candidates: only Goldwater in 1964 and Reagan in 1980 received a netnegative rating. Secondly, in ten out of thirteen elections Americans rate Republicancandidates less positively on the Personal dimension than on the ERIG, or Experience etc.,dimension. In fact, in election after election Americans feel either neutral or ambivalentabout Republican presidential candidates as people, scoring them very close to zero.48

Surprisingly, this was true even for Eisenhower in 1956 and Reagan in 1984, bothnow warmly remembered in personal terms. As these observations indicate, pundits’judgements after the fact often differ from what Americans felt in the months leading up

Fig. 2. Net candidate evaluations: Republican presidential candidatesSource: National Election Studies.

45 For the numerical codes placed in the ‘personal’ category, see Appendix A to the website version of thisarticle.

46 The authors conducted two independent codings, one in early 2001 before the 2000 study was released andanother in the autumn of 2001. The agreement was substantial. In the first coding ninety-three of the approximately700 codes were chosen as personal qualities. In the second ninety-seven codes were selected. Eight codes newin 2000 were added and four general codes selected earlier were dropped (‘people have confidence (don’t haveconfidence) in him’, and ‘just like (dislike) him’.)

47 The points in the graphs are the averages across all voters who were asked the questions that year. Eachpositive comment gets plus one point and each negative comment minus one point. The voter’s score is the sumof the positives and negatives.

48 A zero score for a voter can reflect either no comments at all or an equal number of positives and negatives.Similarly, an average near zero across all voters can reflect any mix of neutral feelings among some voters alongwith a near balance of voters who like and dislike the candidate.


to the election. In particular, it is striking that aside from Goldwater the Republican viewedmost negatively on the personal dimension was Reagan in 1980. Popular history tends toforget that many Americans were quite nervous about entrusting this sabre-rattling formermovie actor with the presidency.

And what of 2000? Bush’s reputed likeability does show up in the data. By a very smallmargin Bush is the highest rated Republican in the half-century on the personal dimension– higher than Eisenhower in 1956 and Reagan in 1984.49 In absolute terms the populationstill rates him very close to neutral, but for a Republican, he was well liked. Note however,that on the ERIG dimension, Bush is lower than any Republican except Goldwater,although still close to the neutral point.

Figure 3 reports analogous figures for Democrats. Here, patterns are not apparent.Democratic candidates are evaluated negatively more often than Republicans, and they arerated more highly as people about as often as they are rated more highly on the ERIGdimension. Overall, McGovern in 1972 was the weakest Democrat in the series, but BillClinton in 1996 set the low water mark on the personal dimension. As for Al Gore, he doesnot particularly stand out. He is rated very near the neutral point in both categories,although on the personal dimension he bests only Clinton in 1996, McGovern in 1972 andHumphrey in 1968. Overall, Gore was not as well liked personally as most of hisDemocratic predecessors, but there is little indication in the data that Americans found himparticularly unlikeable.

Figure 4 rearranges the data to contrast Republican and Democratic candidates on thepersonal dimension. Americans tend to like Democrats at least as much as Republicans.The biggest Democratic edge occurred in 1980, but although Americans liked JimmyCarter as a person considerably more than they did Ronald Reagan, that was not nearlyenough reason to re-elect him. Similarly, the largest Republican edge occurred in 1996,but Americans did not dislike Bill Clinton enough to elect Robert Dole, whom they dislikedtoo, just not as much. Such findings should reassure those who fear that presidential politicshas degenerated into a personality contest.50

Fig. 3. Net candidate evaulations: Democratic presidential candidatesSource: National Election Studies.

49 Admittedly, this finding seems implausible. One complication in using the likes/dislikes questions is thatvoters surely respond with whatever considerations are most easily accessible in their memories. For a successfulincumbent like Eisenhower or Reagan, performance or policy responses are readily at hand, but for a newcomerlike Bush, voters have little to go on besides impressions of his personality.

50 Over the time series there is a dramatic increase in the proportion of responses that fall in the personalcategory, from about 15 per cent in the 1950s to more than 60 per cent in recent elections. At first glance, this


Fig. 4. Net personal candidate evaluations: Republicans v. DemocratsSource: National Election Studies.

Figure 4 also shows that John Kennedy did not win in 1960 because of his personality– Americans liked Nixon about as much.51 Nor did Dukakis lose in 1988 because votersthought he looked silly riding around in a tank. Perhaps he did, but Dukakis was rated everso slightly more positively than George Bush the elder. As for 2000, George Bush theyounger does have a slight edge over Al Gore, the first time a Republican was rated bothpositively and higher than the Democrat since Nixon in 1972.

Figure 5 contrasts Republicans and Democrats on the ERIG dimension. Republicancandidates have a clear edge in this category, achieving a higher rating in eight elections,and essentially tying in two more. But Al Gore is one of only three Democrats in ahalf-century to have an edge in this category and the first since Carter in 1976. Conversely,Bush was the first Republican since Nixon in 1968 to be rated clearly lower on the ERIGdimension.52

In sum, Americans in 2000 did not register strong feelings about the candidates, eitherindividually (a bare majority gave both Bush and Gore neutral ratings) or in the aggregate.True, Americans did not like Al Gore personally as well as they liked many of hisDemocratic predecessors or, of greater relevance, quite as much as they liked George Bush.But the differences are small, and – unusual for a Democrat – Gore bested Bush on theexperience and record dimension.


appears to be striking evidence in support of those who claim that the modern media, especially television, haveperverted politics. Television covers politics in highly personal terms, and voters apparently have begun to takethe cues and do likewise when asked about the candidates (see Sam Abrams, ‘The 21st Century American Voter:Image, Information, and Presidential Appraisal in the Digital Age’ (Honors thesis, Stanford University, 2002).As the examples in the text suggest, however, voters are perfectly willing to defeat candidates whom they likeand elect those whom they do not like. Moreover, the statistical analyses reported in Tables 1–3 show no increasein the weight voters give to personal qualities when making their choices.

51 ‘If the eventual account given by the political histories is that Nixon was a weak candidate in 1960, it willbe largely myth’ (Stokes, ‘Some Dynamic Elements of Contests for the Presidency’, p. 22).

52 These findings are consistent with those of Johnston, Hagen and Jamieson, ‘Dynamics of the 2000Presidential Campaign’ (see their Figure 10), who conclude (using different data and measures) that Bushoutscored Gore on character, whereas Gore outscored Bush on competence.


Fig. 5. Net ERIG candidate evaluations: Republicans v. DemocratsSource: National Election Studies.

As for the weights voters gave to candidate qualities, Tables 1–3 show that they werenot unusually high in 2000. On the contrary, they were on the low side relative to otherelections. Thus, there is no support for the Oprah variant of Hypothesis 2.53 Nor did wefind support for the anti-Gore media hypothesis. We checked to see if high mediaconsumers were more likely to evaluate Gore negatively than low media consumers. Theywere not. And while evaluations of Gore’s person were significantly lower among thoseinterviewed after the first debate, evaluations of his experience, record and positions weresimilarly lower.54 All in all, despite the attention it received in the popular press and thelate night television shows, it appears that the candidate factor in 2000 was a wash.55 Gore’spersonality does not account for his poor showing.

Hypothesis 3: Did Gore Run Too Far Left?

We constructed a general measure of voter distance from the candidates on the standardliberal–conservative scale.56 Figure 6 plots the comparative closeness of the in-party andout-party nominees to the voting public, where a positive number indicates that the average

53 As an aside, regular viewers of Oprah (an item included on the 2000 NES survey) actually gave higherpersonal ratings to Gore than did non-viewers.

54 The tracking polls showed that Gore’s lead over Bush began to drop before the first debate. The fact thatboth his personal and ERIG evaluations were lower among those interviewed after the first debate suggests thathis somewhat obnoxious performance was not the critical factor.

55 Clearly there is much more that can be said about this subject, but our preliminary investigations have foundlittle reflection in the data of various popular claims about the candidate factor in 2000.

56 Proximity measures are calculated in the usual way from seven-point liberal–conservative scales on whichrespondents place themselves and the candidates. The scale is calculated by taking the absolute value of the voter’sdistance from the incumbent party candidate and subtracting the absolute value of the voter’s distance from theout-party candidate (a positive value indicates the voter is closer to the out-party). Proximity measures areproblematic on two grounds. First, because scores are calculated only for voters who place themselves and bothcandidates, a significant number of voters are omitted from the estimations. Secondly, the questions offer anincentive for the voter to rationalize her answer: if she likes Al Gore and intends to vote for him, is she not temptedto place him closer to herself than Bush whatever the reality? In recognition of these problems, Tables 1 and 2report two sets of alternative models, one using voter self-placements alone instead of proximities, thus lesseningthe rationalization possibility, and another omitting ideology entirely, greatly increasing the number of usablecases.


Fig. 6. In-party proximity minus out-party proximitySource: National Election Studies.

voter places herself further from the in-party than the out-party. In 2000 the average votersaw Gore as 0.7 of a scale position more distant than Bush.57 This may not seem like alarge number in absolute terms, but it is the largest ideological disadvantage any candidateregistered in the eight elections in the series, larger even than Dukakis suffered in 1988at the hands of the Bush Sr campaign or McGovern suffered in 1972 at the hands of theNixon campaign. Apparently the laundry list of campaign issues on which voters preferredGore to Bush – social security, environment, education and so forth – did not capture thesubjective processes voters used to position the two candidates.

The statistical analyses reported in Table 3 estimate the weight voters give to each pointof relative ideological distance to be small, but significant. The coefficients are generallysimilar from election to election, but, interestingly, the 2000 coefficient is the smallest inthe series. Thus, while Gore’s perceived ideological distance is the largest in the series,the weight voters attached to it is the smallest, resulting in less electoral damage thanotherwise would have occurred. Still, simulations based on the Table 3 equations suggestthat had Gore been as close to the average voter in 2000 as Clinton was in 1996, his votewould have increased by approximately 4 percentage points, all else being equal.58 He stillwould have under-performed, but almost certainly he would have won the presidency.

Hypothesis 4: Were Americans Tired of Clinton?

Earlier we noted that Gore did not get as big a boost from Clinton’s high job performanceratings as the senior George Bush did in 1988 from Reagan’s ratings. One possible reasonis that Gore ran the wrong campaign. But in order to draw such a conclusion, one wouldneed evidence that a closer association with Clinton would have boosted Gore’s showing.There is no way to provide direct evidence – the campaign was what it was, but the indirectevidence suggests that the Gore campaign did have reason to fear that their candidate mightsuffer from close association with Clinton.

57 In 2000 a NES question format experiment resulted in less than half the sample having ideology andproximity scores comparable to those in previous years. The subsamples were randomly selected, but the smallern (approximately 425 in the estimations that include the proximity measure) results in noisier data for 2000.

58 We obtain this estimate by substituting the means of the 1996 candidate proximity values within each of theseven party-identification categories for the actual 2000 values.


Our conclusion reflects a closer comparison of the 1988 and 2000 elections. To theequation abstracted in Table 1 we added another variable – a measure of the personalratings of the retiring president. Numerous polls have shown that while Clinton’s jobapproval stayed quite high throughout the two years preceding the election, his personalratings – never as high to begin with – were much lower.59 Unfortunately, the NES studiesask the likes/dislikes questions only about the candidates, not about retiring presidents, sowe cannot measure how voters evaluated the retiring presidents in a manner comparableto how they evaluated the candidates. In fact, our options for rating retiring presidents arequite limited.

Although admittedly imperfect, we have utilized a set of so-called ‘affect’ questions thatask the voter whether the president has ever made her feel angry, hopeful, afraid or proud– two positive emotions, two negative ones. These items elicit emotional – even visceral– reactions to the president and tap people’s feelings about the presidents as people.60 Wecombine voter responses to give them net scores for President Reagan in 1988 andPresident Clinton in 2000.61 Figure 7 contrasts the two.

A majority of the 1988 sample evaluated Reagan positively on this index, with the mostpositive rating being the one most commonly observed. In contrast, the 2000 sample ratesClinton much lower – a bit more than a third positive – with the most positive rating beingthe one least frequently observed. Did such ratings affect the decisions to support thevice-presidents of these presidents? The first two columns of Table 5 show that the answeris a clear ‘Yes’. Over and above the influences already considered, emotional reactions tothe retiring president are highly significant in a statistical sense. The estimated weights that

Fig. 7. Reagan had higher personal ratings than ClintonNote: The Affect Index has been calculated from the respondent’s responses to ‘Does (Reagan/Clinton) make youfeel (angry/afraid, hopeful, and proud)? � 2 and 2 are the extreme negative and positive ratings respectively, withzero being a neutral affect rating.Source: National Election Studies.

59 See footnote 33 above.60 Evidence that responses to these items tap something beyond voter partisanship and performance evaluations

comes from the fact that the coefficients on party identification, presidential approval and economic conditionsare only marginally diminished by the addition of this measure to the equation.

61 The president received � 1 for each positive emotion indicated by a voter, � 1 for each negative emotion.So, each voter’s score lies between –2 and � 2 inclusive. Again, zero can reflect either a balance of positive andnegative emotions or no emotions.


voters attached to Reagan’s and Clinton’s personal ratings are very similar, but Reagan’sactual ratings were much more positive. Simulations based on these equations suggest thathad Clinton’s personal ratings in 2000 been as positive as were Reagan’s ratings in 1988,Al Gore’s vote would have been approximately 3–4 percentage points higher, all else beingequal.62

The third column of Table 5 investigates this matter a bit further. A new item on the2000 NES questionnaire asks the respondent whether, since 1992, the moral climate of thecountry has got better, got worse or stayed about the same. As shown in Figure 8 thedistribution of responses was quite skewed: less than 5 per cent of the sample thought ithad become better and 45 per cent thought it had become worse.63 Adding these sentimentsto the equation appears to pick up something beyond that incorporated in Clinton’s job andpersonal ratings and implies that Bill Clinton’s legacy exacted a penalty on support for AlGore.64

What of the Gore campaign’s contention that had they tried to associate Gore moreclosely with the economic successes of the Clinton administration, they would have

TABLE 5 Moral Retrospective Voting

1988 2000 2000*

Constant � 0.794 � 0.774 � 0.492Dem PID 0.938 1.226 1.248Rep PID � 0.663 � 1.120 � 1.044Economy better 0.280 0.273 0.229Economy worse – – –Approve president 1.016 0.841 0.710Rep personal – – –Rep ERIG 0.169 – –Dem personal – 0.195 0.221Dem ERIG – – –Reagan/Clinton personal 0.179 0.187 0.167Better moral climate † † –Worse moral climate † † � 0.539

N 1,122 1,071 1,056

Note: Cell entries are probit coefficients. Only coefficients significant at 0.05 arereported.*Including the ‘moral climate’ variables. See text for explanation.†Variable not included (variable not available in 1988).

62 This estimate is obtained by substituting the means of 1988 Reagan ratings within the sevenparty-identification categories for the actual 2000 Clinton ratings, reversing the scale so that strong Democratsin 2000 liked Clinton as much on average as strong Republicans in 1988 liked Reagan, and so on for the othercategories.

63 Sceptics might object that this item is merely a proxy for whether the voter likes Clinton. Note, however,that the item does not mention the retiring president. Moreover, analysis indicates that the item behaves asone would expect if taken at face value. Controlling for voter partisanship and Clinton job ratings, belief inmoral deterioration relates significantly to various indicators of religiosity and moral traditionalism. WhileDemocrats naturally are less likely to believe that the country is morally rotten than Republicans andindependents, insignificant interactions between party identification and these measures indicate that religion andtraditional morality had an across-the-board effect. For details, see Appendix B to the website version of thisarticle.

64 To be fair, Bill Clinton’s personal transgressions probably were not the only source of beliefs that the moralstate of the country was in decline.


Fig. 8. Moral climate in United States since 1992Source: National Election Studies.

simultaneously linked themselves more closely with the president’s moral failings? Wehave no way of estimating what the trade-off might have been, but the implication ofTable 5 is that such fears were not imaginary. Disapproval of Bill Clinton’s personalbehaviour hurt Al Gore. Still, our personal view is that Gore already was suffering fromthe fallout of Clinton’s behaviour and would have lost no more had he tried to emphasizethe positive accomplishments of the administration. Had Gore captured just one moresmall state – Arkansas, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, West Virginia – that henarrowly lost, Florida would have been irrelevant. Even if a closer connection with Clintonhad lost popular votes, had it led to victory in one more state it would have meant thepresidency.65

SUMMARY: AL GORE’S UNDER-PERFORMANCE IN 2000

A hirsute Al Gore re-emerged on the political scene in the summer of 2001, setting off aflurry of speculation about his plans. Judgements about his presidential prospects orlack thereof hinged heavily on the pundit’s beliefs about Gore’s loss. Did Gore barely top50 per cent of the two-party vote when a large number of forecasting models had himtopping 55 per cent because of his wooden personality? His populist campaign? The dragof Bill Clinton’s personal escapades? No one can answer that question with certainty, butthe preceding analyses enable us to go beyond punditry and parlour talk. To sum up ourresults:

Al Gore the person. Of the various explanations for Gore’s poor showing, only the onethat focuses on negative voter reaction to his personality finds little support in the data.Although Gore was not particularly popular, that alone hurt him little, if at all. Evaluationsof both candidates were largely neutral within the population – both in the aggregate andindividually, and there is no indication that voters attached any more weight to personalityfactors than they usually do.

65 Ironically, it might have led to a reversal of the actual verdict – a popular vote victory for Bush, but anElectoral College majority for Gore.


Ideology. Consistent with the interpretations of the Democratic Leadership Council,Gore’s decision to run from the left exacted a vote penalty. Our estimates based on Table3 suggest that Gore’s decision to abandon Clinton’s centrist approach and campaign as aborn-again populist cost him about 4 percentage points of the vote, easily enough to losethe election, all else equal.

Clinton fatigue. Consistent with the views of the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party,the personal transgressions of Bill Clinton finally came home to roost in 2000. ManyAmericans who judged Clinton’s job performance positively looked on his personalbehaviour with distaste, and many of them voted for Bush, perhaps contributing to theunusually weak relationship between the fundamentals and the vote. Holding everythingelse constant, estimates based on Table 5 suggest that Clinton fatigue, broadly defined,probably cost Gore directly 3–4 percentage points of the vote, easily enough to lose theelection.

The fundamentals. Judgements of presidential performance mattered less in 2000 than inearlier elections. The weaker effects do not appear to be a result of the sheer length of thegood times, nor of Alan Greenspan getting all the credit. Gore’s vice-presidential statusmay have played some role, but in the end the choices of the Gore campaign seem mostprominent. Other things being equal, the weaker relationship made a difference of about8 percentage points as compared to the 1988 election when another vice-president followeda successful president. The weaker impact of the fundamentals turned a prospectivelandslide into a virtual tie.

Total. Re-run the election statistically correcting all of Gore’s mistakes or misfortunes: Gorereceives the same degree of credit for the economy and the administration’s performanceas G. H. W. Bush got in 1988; Clinton’s personal ratings are as positive as Reagan’s werein 1988, and Gore is as close to the voters as Clinton was in 1996. If all these conditionshold, then Gore wins the election in a landslide, with 58 per cent of the vote.66

Political science forecasting models performed poorly in 2000 because the traditionaleffects of the fundamentals were muted, because the models omitted an important variable– Bill Clinton’s personal ratings – that worked in opposition to the fundamentals, andbecause Gore ran a neo-populist campaign that was not optimal given the views of theelectorate. From the standpoint of an election forecaster everything that could go wrongdid.

The great question that we cannot answer is why Gore ran the campaign that he did. Themost parsimonious explanation of our findings is that the fundamentals were mutedbecause Gore deliberately declined to claim credit for prosperity and chose instead tocampaign in a way that minimized his association with Clinton. If so, and his fears of taintfrom Clinton’s sleazy behaviour were justified, then there is little need to revise theforecasting models in any major way. Analysts need only add a presidential personal ratingto their models. (Given that personal and performance ratings rarely have the kind ofdisjunction evident in 2000, a dummy variable for 2000 may suffice.)

66 Taken all together the considerations do not predict a historically unprecedented victory for Gore becausethe effects are not additive. Declining marginal impact is inherent in probit models. Moreover, the effect ofideological proximity combined with presidential performance (Table 3) only equals the independent impact ofperformance (Tables 1 or 2).


By contrast, if future research shows that the effects of the fundamentals were mutedin 2000 because voters have shifted away from classical retrospective voting based onnational and international conditions towards moral retrospective voting based oncharacter and ethics, then the models will continue to go awry. We think the formerpossibility is the more likely of the two, but data from elections to come will settle the issue.

187a F I O R I N A, A B R A M S A N D P O P E

A P P E N D I X A : N E S ‘ P E R S O N A L C H A R A C T E R I S T I C S ’ C O D E S

Candidate Only – Experience, Ability

0201 General reference to him as ‘a good/bad man or a good/bad guy’. R has heard good/bad things abouthim; qualifications; general ability; reference to his ‘personality’

0213 Dependable/trustworthy/reliable; a man you can trust with the responsibilities of government(‘trust’ in the capability sense, rather than the honesty sense)

0214 Undependable/untrustworthy/unreliable; a man you can’t trust with the responsibilities ofgovernment

Candidate Only – Candidate Leadership Qualities

0301 Dignified/has dignity0302 Undignified/lacks dignity0303 Strong/decisive/self-confident/aggressive; will end all this indecision0304 Weak/indecisive/lacks self-confidence/vacillating; [1996] waffles, wishy-washy0305 Inspiring; a man you can follow; ‘a leader’; [1996] charisma0306 Uninspiring; not a man you can follow; not a leader; [1996] lacks charisma0335 Makes people feel good about America/being Americans; is patriotic/loves the country0307 People have confidence in him0308 People don’t have confidence in him0309 Good at communicating with blacks, young people, other ‘problem’ groups0310 Bad at communicating with blacks, young people, other ‘problem’ groups (if communicate in

general, see 0441, 0442)0311 Knows how to handle people (at personal level)0312 Doesn’t know how to handle people (at personal level)0313 A politician/political person; (too) much in politics; a good politician; part of Washington crowd;

politically motivated; just wants to be re-elected0314 Not a politician; not in politics; above politics; a bad politician0315 Independent; no one runs him; his own boss0316 Not independent; run by others; not his own man/boss0317 Humble; knows his limitations; doesn’t pretend to know all the answers0318 Not humble enough; too cocky/self-confident; can’t admit shortcomings; blames others for his/her

mistakes0319 (Too) Careful/cautious/good judgement0320 (Too) Impulsive/careless/bad/poor judgement0334 Poor at explaining himself/his positions; doesn’t answer questions clearly; speaks off the top of his

head/doesn’t stop to think before he speaks

Candidate Only – Personal Qualities

0401 Honest/sincere; keeps promises; man of integrity; means what he says; fair; not tricky; open andcandid; straightforward; positive Playboy references (1976)

0402 Dishonest/insincere; breaks promises; no integrity; doesn’t mean what he says; tricky; not open andcandid; not straightforward

0403 Man of high principles/ideals; high moral purpose; idealistic (if too idealistic, code 0416)0404 Lacks principles/ideals0405 Racist/bigoted/prejudiced0406 Not a racist/bigoted/prejudiced0407 Public servant; man of duty; conscientious; hard-working; would be a full-time president; good

attendance record in Congress; dedicated; really interested in serving people0408 Doesn’t take public service seriously; lazy; would be a part-time president; poor attendance record

in office; not dedicated; not really interested in serving people0409 Doesn’t use office for personal benefit; not in office to maximize personal benefit0410 Uses/in office (mostly) for personal benefits (junket trips, big salary, other perks)0411 Patriotic; (88) like Bush’s stand on Pledge of Allegiance issue0412 Unpatriotic; (88) dislike Dukakis’s stand on Pledge of Allegiance issue0415 Realistic

The 2000 US Presidential Election 187b

0416 Unrealistic; too idealistic; (if ‘idealistic’ in positive sense, code 0403)0417 Uses common sense; makes a lot of sense; pragmatic/ practical/down-to-earth0418 Not sensible; impractical0419 (Too) well educated; scholarly0420 Poorly educated; unschooled0421 Intelligent/smart0422 Unintelligent/stupid/dumb0464 Uninformed; doesn’t (seem to) know anything about the issues/what is going on in the

country/government0423 Religious; ‘moral’ (in religious sense); God-fearing; ‘too’ religious0424 ‘Irreligious’; ‘immoral’ (in religious sense); Playboy interview (reflects on Carter – 1976)0425 Self-made; not well off; started out as poor; worked his way up; (started out) unpolished/unrefined/

rough0426 Wealthy; rich; born with silver spoon in mouth; polished/refined/well-mannered; bought way into

office; use of own money to finance campaign0431 Unsafe/unstable; dictatorial; craves power; ruthless0432 Safe/stable0433 Sense of humour; jokes a lot (too much)0434 No sense of humour; humourless (too serious)0435 Kind/warm/gentle; [1996] caring0436 Cold/aloof0437 Likeable; gets along with people; friendly; outgoing; [1996] nice0438 Not likeable; can’t get along with people0439 Democratic (in non-partisan sense)0440 Undemocratic (in non-partisan sense)0441 High-fallutin’/high-brow; talks in circles; can’t talk to common man; can’t communicate ideas well0442 Not high-fallutin’/is low-brow; talks straight; can talk to common man; can communicate ideas well0445 Reference to his family (not 0457)0447 Speaking ability0449 Appearance/looks/face/appearance on TV; his smile0450 Age (NA how perceived)0451 (Too) Old0452 (Too) Young0453 Mature0454 Immature0455 Regional reference; ‘he’s a Southerner’; ‘he’s a Midwesterner’; he comes from the country/a rural

area; area reference0456 Previous occupation0457 He’s a family man0459 Energetic; too energetic0460 Not energetic0461 Gender, e.g., ‘She’s a woman’0462 Racial/ethnic attribute; ‘He is a black man’0495 Other negative personal qualities0496 Other positive personal qualities0497 Other candidate personal qualities465 Taking undeserved credit; taking credit for actions, events, or policies one is not responsible for;

Gore claiming ‘to have invented the internet’.466 Overcoming adversity in one’s personal life; overcoming handicaps, disabilities, disease,

alcoholism, or other similar problem.0551 References to link with ‘Watergate’ – positive reference to Watergate0552 Not associated with ‘Watergate’ – negative reference to Watergate; making too much out of

Watergate0603 Honest government; not corrupt; no ‘mess in Washington’*0622 Doesn’t work (hard) at job; not involved (enough) in the work of his office/delegates too much

authority to others; has chosen poor/incompetent aides; his aides have not performed well0617 Will face (difficult) issues; faces problems directly; faces up to political reality0618 Will not face (difficult) issues; will not face problems directly; ignores political reality

187c F I O R I N A, A B R A M S A N D P O P E

Party or Candidate – Miscellaneous

0701 Just like him/them (NA why); like everything about him/them; ‘I was hoping he would win the(nomination/primaries)’

0702 Just dislike/don’t like him/them (NA why); don’t like anything about him/them0719 References to damaging incidents in candidate’s personal life (sexual escapades, financial problems,

substance abuse, etc); [1980] Reference to Chappaquidic; Kennedy’s personal problems0727 Expression of sympathy/admiration for the candidate’s underdog position; trying hard against

terrible odds; courageous uphill battle; ‘I like underdogs’; ‘they are bucking the guy’ (keeping himoff ballot, not taking him seriously, not giving him enough publicity)

0728 Negative comments about the candidate’s switching parties, being a turncoat, disloyal to his originalparty

0729 Party selection of a woman for voice-president734 [1996] Reference to Whitewater, Travel Office firings, FBI files controversies

Party or Candidate – Government Activity/Philosophy

0804 (Too) negative; always tearing down other side; no solutions of his/their own0831 Generous, compassionate, believe in helping others0832 Selfish, only help themselves0833 Acceptance of change/new ideas; less bound to status quo; more open to new ideas/ways of doing

things; flexible, innovative0834 Resistance to change/new ideas; stick to (protect) status quo; resist new ways of doing things; rigid0835 Has a well-defined set of beliefs/definite philosophy; does not compromise on principles; has (clear)

understanding of goals they stand for0836 Has poorly defined set of beliefs; lacks a definite philosophy; compromise on principles; has no

(clear) understanding of goals they stand for

A P P E N D I X B : M O R A L D E C L I N E

The moral decline variable included in column 3 of Table 5 is relatively new – ANES first included theitem in the 1996 survey. Thus, most readers will be unfamiliar with the variable and its correlates. TableA displays a set of ordered probit models where the left-hand-side variable comes from the question: ‘Wouldyou say that compared to 1992, the nation’s moral climate has gotten better, stayed about the same, or gottenworse?’ Those who found it better or worse then were asked to qualify it as ‘much’ or ‘somewhat’. A higherscore indicates that respondents felt the moral climate had declined.

To determine whether this variable is more than a reflection of partisanship or performance evaluations,we modelled perceptions of moral decline as a function of partisanship, presidential approval and variousmeasures of religiosity and moral traditionalism. The moral traditionalism index consists of four questionsthat ask whether or not new lifestyles are contributing to social breakdown, whether or not people shouldadjust their views to or tolerate new morality, and the importance of family ties. To create the religiosityindex we used church attendance, a measure of how important religion is in the respondent’s life, andhow often a person reported praying. We attempted several different specifications of these indexes(including simply employing an array of dummy variables) and did not find our conclusions to varysignificantly.

Unsurprisingly, Democrats were less likely than Republicans and independents to judge that the moralclimate of the country had declined. Additionally, approval of Clinton’s job performance has a negativeassociation with perceptions of moral decline. But both the traditionalism and religiosity indexes contributesignificantly to a perception of moral decline, consistent with the idea that people’s evaluations of Clinton(and ultimately Gore) were partially rooted in a moral calculus. While we expected to find significantinteraction effects between party identification and religion or traditionalism, there is not much evidenceof these – religiosity and moral traditionalism affect Democrats and Republicans more or less the same.Importantly, despite the finding that Democrats were less likely to perceive moral decline, there is not muchdifference between Republicans and independents, meaning to the degree that a partisan effect existed, itwas mostly a function of committed Democrats who claimed that the moral climate either had gotten betteror stayed the same.

The 2000 US Presidential Election 187d

T A B L E A Moral Climate Ordered Probit Models

Coefficient Value Std. Err. Value Std. Err. Value Std. Err.

Democrat � 0.2494 (0.1040) � 0.1656 (0.1192) � 0.2125 (0.2022)Republican 0.1515 (0.1067) 0.1724 (0.1269) 0.2437 (0.2118)Presidential approval � 0.4744 (0.0732) � 0.4533 (0.0738) � 0.4771 (0.0734)Traditionalism 0.0973 (0.0101) 0.1384 (0.0336) 0.0975 (0.0101)Religiosity 0.0370 (0.0146) 0.0367 (0.0146) 0.0506 (0.4230)Dem:Trad. � 0.0628 (0.0354)GOP:Trad. � 0.0186 (0.0361)Dem:Rel. � 0.0098 (0.0458)GOP:Rel. � 0.0234 (0.0475)Intercept 2.3382 (0.1401) 2.2508 (0.1515) 2.2889 (0.2045)

the 2000 us presidential election: can retrospective

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